When Mattie got home to her garret, she found a visitor waiting on the steps. She had met this woman before at one of Loharri's gatherings—her name was Iolanda; she stood out from the crowd, Mattie remembered—she moved energetically and laughed loudly, and looked Mattie straight in the eye when they were introduced. And now Iolanda's gaze did not waver. “May I come in?” she said as soon as she saw Mattie, and smiled.
“Of course,” Mattie said and unlocked the door. The corridor was narrow and led directly into her room that contained a roll top desk and her few books; Mattie led her visitor through and into the laboratory, where there was space to sit and talk.
“Would you like a drink?” Mattie asked. “I have a lovely jasmine-flavored liqueur.”
Iolanda nodded. “I would love that. How considerate of you to keep refreshments.”
Mattie poured her a drink. “Of course,” she said. “How kind of you to notice.”
Iolanda took the proffered glass from Mattie's copper fingers, studying them as she did so, and took a long swallow. “Indeed, it is divine,” she said. “Now, if you don't mind, I would like to dispense with the pleasantries and state my business.”
Mattie inclined her head and sat on a stool by her workbench, offering the other one to Iolanda with a gesture.
“You are not wealthy,” Iolanda said. Not a question but a statement.
“Not really,” Mattie agreed. “But I do not need much.”
“Mmmm,” Iolanda said. “One might suspect that a well-off alchemist is a successful alchemist—you do need to buy your ingredients, and some are more expensive than others.”
“That is true,” Mattie said. “Now, how does this relate to your business?”
“I can make you rich,” Iolanda said. “I have need of an alchemist, of one who is discreet and skillful. But before I explain my needs, let me ask you this: do you consider yourself a woman?”
“Of course,” Mattie said, taken aback and puzzled. “What else would I consider myself?”
“Perhaps I did not phrase it well,” Iolanda said, and tossed back the remainder of her drink with an unexpectedly habitual and abrupt gesture. “What I meant was, why do you consider yourself a woman? Because you were created as one?”
“Yes,” Mattie replied although she grew increasingly uncomfortable with the conversation. “And because of the clothes I wear.”
“So if you changed your clothes . . . ”
“But I can't,” Mattie said. “The shape of them is built into me—I know that you have to wear corsets and hoops and stays to give your clothes a proper shape. But I was created with all of those already in place, they are as much as part of me as my eyes. So I ask you: what else would you consider me?”
“I sought not to offend,” Iolanda said. “I do confess to my prejudice: I will not do business nor would I employ a person or an automaton of a gender different from mine, and I simply had to know if your gender was coincidental.”
“I understand,” Mattie said. “And I assure you that my femaleness is as ingrained as your own.”
Iolanda sighed. Mattie supposed that Iolanda was beautiful, with her shining dark curls cascading onto her full shoulders and chest, and heavy languid eyelids half-concealing her dark eyes. “Fair enough. And Loharri . . . can you keep secrets from him?”
“I can and I do,” Mattie said.
“In this case, I will appreciate it if you keep our business private,” Iolanda said.
“I will, once you tell me what it is,” Mattie replied. She shot an involuntary look toward her bench, where the ingredients waited for her to grind and mix and vaporize them, where the aludel yawned empty as if hungry; she grew restless sitting for too long empty-handed and motionless.
Iolanda raised her eyebrows, as if unsure whether she understood Mattie. She seemed one of those people who rarely encountered anything but abject agreement, and she was not used to being hurried. “Well, I want you to be available for the times I have a need of you, and to fulfill my orders on a short notice. Potions, perfumes, tonics . . . that sort of thing. I will pay you a retainer, so you will be receiving money even when I do not have a need of you.”
“I have other clients and projects,” Mattie said.
Iolanda waved her hand dismissively. “It doesn't matter. As long as I can find you when I need you.”
“It sounds reasonable,” Mattie agreed. “I will endeavor to fulfill simple orders within a day, and complex ones — from two days to a week. You won't have them done faster anywhere.”
“It is acceptable,” Iolanda said. “And for your first order, I need you to create me a fragrance that would cause regret.”
“Come back tomorrow,” Mattie said. “Or leave me your address, I'll have a courier bring it over.”
“No need,” Iolanda said. “I will send someone to pick it up. And here's your first week's pay.” She rose from her stool and placed a small pouch of stones on the bench. “And if anyone asks, we are casual acquaintances, nothing more.”
Iolanda left, and Mattie felt too preoccupied to even look at the stones that were her payment. She almost regretted agreeing to Iolanda's requests—while they seemed straightforward and it was not that uncommon for courtiers to employ alchemists or any other artisans on a contract basis, something about Iolanda seemed off. Most puzzling, if she wanted to keep a secret from Loharri, she could do better than hire the automaton made by his hands. Mattie was not so vain as to presuppose that her reputation outweighed common good sense.
But there was work to do, and perfume certainly seemed less daunting than granting gargoyles a lifespan extension, and she mixed ambergris and sage, blended myrrh and the bark of grave cypress, and sublimated dry camphor. The smell she obtained was pleasing and sad, and yet she was not certain that this was enough to evoke regret—something seemed missing. She closed her eyes and smelled-tasted the mixture with her sensors, trying hard to remember the last time she felt regret.
Ekaterina Sedia is the author of The Secret History of Moscow. A native of Russia, she lives in New Jersey.
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THE ALCHEMY OF STONE by Ekaterina Sedia
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Lost in Lovecraft
A guided tour of the dark master's world | by Kenneth Hite
This stop: CTHULHU'S PACIFIC OCEAN
“It was in one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacific that the packet of which I was supercargo fell a victim to the German sea-raider.”
—H.P. Lovecraft, “Dagon”
for a new englander, Lovecraft gives surprisingly short shrift to the Atlantic. “The Temple” and a few minor pieces aside, almost all of Lovecraft's oceanic brooding concerns the vast Pacific. The Pacific swells in “Dagon,” HPL's first story in Weird Tales, and if we take Australia as a Pacific nation, its waves are audible in “The Shadow Out of Time,” his penultimate tale. So what surfaces in Lovecraft, in the “least frequented parts” of the ocean?
“With the upheaval of new land in the South Pacific tremendous events began.”
—H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness
As befits our subject, let's broaden the scope somewhat. To Americans, even to New Englanders, the Pacific has long been the next frontier. When America's westward expansion hit the shores of California and Oregon, it kept going: to Hawaii and Samoa and Guam and the Philippines in Lovecraft's youth. Lovecraft's fellow Yankees started “the China trade” in 1790, furs and then whale oil and sandalwood across the Pacific to Canton, and it made them rich. Like the “amber waves of grain” in the West, the Pacific is a treasure-house. Melville, for example, repeatedly equates Pacific whales and gold in Moby-Dick, reinforcing the parallel to the agrarian West with “harvest” metaphors. Lovecraft intriguingly recasts the image: in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” Obed Marsh finds actual gold in the Pacific and brings it back to Innsmouth—along with th
e Pacific's Deep One taint.
“He was the only one as kep' on with the East-Injy an' Pacific trade, though Esdras Martin's barkentine Malay Bride made a venter as late as twenty-eight.”
—H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”
Here Lovecraft and Innsmouth wash up against the other great American trope of the Pacific: as a lure for Americans, a prelapsarian paradise of indolent lotus-eating. Melville's Typee and Omoo portray castaways or marooned victims worrying about being absorbed by the Pacific, or rather, by the Pacific islanders' alien culture. James Fenimore Cooper's The Crater mirrors this metaphor: an idyllic Pacific island actually sinks under the weight of too many modern Americans. Jack London's South Seas Tales likewise present the Pacific as an all-too-seductive beauty spot, remote from the modern world. (Outside America, Paul Gaugin and Robert Louis Stevenson, among others, do their best to reinforce this vision.) While Lovecraft writes no paeans to the glories of Tahiti, note the siren calls in his Innsmouth ship names: Malay Bride and Sumatra Queen. Arch hints at the nature of the “Innsmouth taint” to be sure, but also evidence of the Pacific's powers of seduction. In Moby-Dick, Melville sets it out: “Lifted by those eternal swells, you needs must own the seductive god, bowing your head to Pan,” and his story is of a man driven mad by a seductive god, a sea-monster from the Pacific.
“I talked with the mind of Yiang-Li, a philosopher from the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan, which is to come in 5,000 A.D. . . . with that of an archimage of vanished Yhe in the Pacific . . .”
—H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow Out of Time”
If the Pacific washes away the rational and modern, it does so not least because the Pacific is ancient, its people seen as still the “noble savages” of Enlightenment prehistory, each of its islands an antediluvian Eden. But in keeping with our earlier frontier trope, the Pacific is also the future. (Even now, one can hear that the 21st will be the “Pacific Century,” as history zooms westward around the globe.) So, better yet, the Pacific is not merely ancient, but timeless. Again in Moby-Dick, Melville notes that the Pacific waves wash “the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham.”
Lovecraft finds this metaphor of timelessness far more congenial than the “island Eden” trope. The Pacific is simultaneously unthinkably ancient and looming in the future, both long-dead and stirring to be born. Lovecraft's cosmic sensibilities thrill to the duality. His “Dagon” is both an ancient god and a modern threat. The “Kanakys” wiped out the Deep Ones off Othaheite, but their race plans its resurgence—“the reel horror . . . ain't what them fish devils hez done, but what they're a-goin' to do!”—in Pacific-tainted Innsmouth. In “The Shadow Out of Time,” the catalogue of entities met by Nathaniel Peaslee includes representatives of both distant past and future Pacifics: Yhe and Tsan-Chan. Lovecraft's ultimate blending of the timeless, the primordial, the apocalyptic, and the Pacific looms over them all: Great Cthulhu.
“Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific.”
—H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
Cthulhu is very much of the Pacific, even of a specific spot therein, somewhere between Pitcairn Island (where the Bounty mutineers succumbed to the Pacific's seductions) and Easter Island (with its “ancient” statues). Even Cthulhu has perhaps bowed his head to Pan; his Pacific “deep waters” are “full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass.” But Cthulhu also is Pan, “the madness from the sea.” Cthulhu is a prehistoric memory and the inevitable future all in one, both old and new, as Wilcox notes of his bas-relief at the beginning of the story: “It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx.” Cthulhu once ruled the Earth, then fell in a cataclysm, but “when the stars come right” he will emerge again in a kind of parodic Last Judgment, “a glorious resurrection . . . a holocaust of ecstasy.”
This rhythm, of ancient greatness, catastrophic destruction, current desuetude, and future ascension at the end of the age, is the rhythm of Theosophy. So Lovecraft slyly acknowledges in the introduction to “The Call of Cthulhu”: “Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle . . . [and] have hinted at strange survival in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism.” Lovecraft wrote “Cthulhu” shortly after reading a Theosophical omnibus, The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria by William Scott-Elliot, and specifically mentions that tome in the tale as one of Angell's “Cthulhu Cult” file sources. No one will be surprised to see Pacific mega-continents, sunken islands, and prehuman survivals prominently featured in Scott-Elliot's pages, albeit “masked by a bland optimism.” Lovecraft further “demythologizes” Theosophy, recasting it as paleontology in At the Mountains of Madness, as the bas-reliefs in Kadath tell the epoch-spanning tale of prehuman races and sunken lands in the Pacific.
“Centuries hence … China may yet form a titanic world force to be reckoned with. It would be curious if the oldest of all civilisations of today were to survive its younger rivals in the end.”
—H.P. Lovecraft, letter to Henry George Weiss (Feb. 3, 1937)
Shrinking our scope down a bit from prehuman ecologies to mere lost civilizations, another beat of the Theosophist rhythm is that India, or “Asia,” was great before the West was born, and would rise again to reduce Europe to irrelevance. (Lovecraft's fellow New Englander Emerson said much the same thing.) This fed not only Indian nationalism, but paradoxically fueled Western racism. The generally hopeful message of Theosophy is essentially identical to the generally fearful message of “the Yellow Peril”: the dreaming, even sessile “Asiatics” (for Lovecraft and Americans, on the other side of the Pacific) will awaken from their slumber and destroy the (white) world. Sound familiar?
Lovecraft invokes the Yellow Peril even before he reads Theosophy: in “Polaris,” “He,” and “Nyarlathotep,” the future is yellow, and (white) civilization is overthrown. When he adds Theosophy to the mixture, things get even weirder: in the cosmic time-cycles of “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” HPL takes time to note that Pickman Carter “in the year 2169 would use strange means in repelling the Mongol hordes from Australia,” and we've already met “the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan” of 5000 A.D. Lovecraft doesn't leave the Yellow Peril in his fiction, either. In a 1919 letter to Alfred Galpin and Maurice Moe, he predicts that the Chinese “are a menace of the still more distant future” who “will probably be the exterminators of Caucasian civilization.” And in a 1934 letter to Natalie Wooley, only the specifics change: “In the end—as we grow weak & decadent . . . Japan will probably dominate the world,” but HPL hopes “that period will be thousands of years in the future.” It's not just Theosophy, then, that leads Lovecraft to put “deathless Chinamen” in charge of the Cthulhu Cult.
“The West, however, was never favourable to [the Ghatanothoa cult's] growth . . . In the end it became a hunted, doubly furtive underground affair—yet never could its nucleus be quite exterminated. It always survived somehow, chiefly in the Far East and on the Pacific Islands, where its teachings became merged into the esoteric lore of the Polynesian Areoi.”
—H.P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald, “Out of the Aeons”
Is “Call of Cthulhu” just a strange Yellow Peril story, Fu Manchu with tentacles? No, it's far vaster than that; it partakes not just of Theosophy's Pacific apocalypses, but the iconic Pacifics of Jack London and Herman Melville: forgetfulness and timelessness, madness and obsession. But for Lovecraft, at least, the Pacific is inextricable from the shores it washes. He demonstrates this in “Out of the Aeons,” as the survivors of the lost continent of Mu (Lemuria renamed by a different Theosophist crackpot, Colonel Churchward) gather in pilgrimage before the mummy of Tyog. By the time the story is done, the litany of “swarthy Asiatics�
�� and “eccentric foreigners” has included Hawaiians, Ceylonese, Filipinos, Peruvian Indians, East Indians, Burmese, and Fijians—and Lovecraft's own authorial stand-in, Randolph Carter, in his “Swami Chandraputra” garb from “Through the Gates of the Silver Key.” The Pacific swallows Lovecraft, too; he has bowed his head before the seductive god Pan. Or Dagon. Or Cthulhu.
Next Stop on the Tour: New York City
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Weird Tales, Volume 51 Page 14